The Romance of a Shop

Richard Garnett, Amy Levy

Description

First published in 1888, “The Romance of a Shop” is a novel by Amy Levy that tells the story of the Lorimer sisters who, following the death of their father, decide to open a photography business to avoid a life of poverty. An interesting exploration of the vagaries and vicissitudes of life for the “New Women” in the late 1900s that will appeal to those with an interest in history and feminism. Contents include: “In the Beginning”, “Friends in Need”, “Ways and Means”, “Number Twenty B”, “This Working-Day World”, “To the Rescue”, “A New Customer”, “A Distinguished Person”, “Show Sunday”, “Summing Up”, “A Confidence”, etc. Amy Judith Levy (1861–1889) was a British poet, novelist, and essayist. She was notably the first Jewish woman to study at Cambridge university, and she became well-known for her feminist positions as well as her romantic relationships with both male and female political and literature figures. Other works by this author include: “Xantippe and Other Verse” (1881), “Reuben Sachs” (1888), and “Miss Meredith” (1889). Read & Co. Classics is proudly republishing this classic novel now in a new edition complete with an introductory biography of the author by Richard Garnett.

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781528791700
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE ROMANCE OF A SHOP
By
AMY LEVY
WITH A BIOGRAPHY BY RICHARD GARNETT

First published in 1888



Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Classics
This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics, an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


Contents
AMY LEVY
By Ric hard Garnett
CHAPTER I
IN T HE BEGINNING
CHAPTER II
FRI ENDS IN NEED
CHAPTER III
WA YS AND MEANS
CHAPTER IV
NUM BER TWENTY B
CHAPTER V
THIS WORKI NG-DAY WORLD
CHAPTER VI
T O THE RESCUE
CHAPTER VII
A NEW CUSTOMER
CHAPTER VIII
A DISTINGU ISHED PERSON
CHAPTER IX
SHOW SUNDAY
CHAPTER X
SUMMING UP
CHAPTER XI
A CONFIDENCE
CHAPTER XII
GERTRUD E IS ANXIOUS
CHAPTER XIII
A ROMANCE
CHAPTER XIV
LUCY
CHAPTER XV
CRESSIDA
CHAPTER XVI
A WEDDING
CHAPTER XVII
A SPE CIAL EDITION
C HAPTER XVIII
PHYLLIS
CHAPTER XIX
T HE SYCAMORES
CHAPTER XX
IN T HE SICK-ROOM
CHAPTER XXI
THE LAST ACT
CHAPTER XXII
HOPE AND A FRIEND
C HAPTER XXIII
A DISMISSAL
CHAPTER XXIV
AT LAST
EPILOGUE


AMY LEVY
By Richard Garnett
AMY LEVY (1861–1889), poetess and novelist, second daughter of Mr. Lewis Levy, by his wife Isabelle [Levin], was born at Clapham on 10 Nov. 1861. Her parents were of the J ewish faith.
She was educated at Brighton, and afterwards at Newnham College, Cambridge. She early showed decided talent, especially for poetry, pieces afterwards thought worthy of preservation having been written in her thir teenth year.
In 1881 a small pamphlet of verse from her pen, ‘Xantippe and other poems,’ was printed at Cambridge. Most of the contents were subsequently incorporated with her second publication, A Minor Poet and Other Verse, (1884). ‘Xantippe’ is in many respects her most powerful production, exhibiting a passionate rhetoric and a keen, piercing dialectic, exceedingly remarkable in so young a writer. It is a defence of Socrates's maligned wife, from the woman's point of view, full of tragic pathos, and only short of complete success from its frequent reproduction of the manner of both the Brownings. The same may be said of ‘A Minor Poet,’ a poem now more interesting than when it was written, from its evident prefigurement of the melancholy fate of the authoress herself. The most important pieces in the volume are in blank verse, too colloquial to be finely modulated, but always terse and nervous. A London Plane Tree and other Poems , (1889), is, on the other hand, chiefly lyrical. Most of the pieces are individually beautiful; as a collection they weary with their monotony of sadness. The authoress responded more readily to painful than to pleasurable emotions, and this incapacity for pleasure was a more serious trouble than her sensitiveness to pain: it deprived her of the encouragement she might have received from the success which, after a fortunate essay with a minor work of fiction, The Romance of a Shop , attended her remarkable novel, Reuben Sachs , (1889). This is a most powerful work, alike in the condensed tragedy of the main action, the striking portraiture of the principal characters, and the keen satire of the less refined aspects of Jewish society. It brought upon the authoress much unpleasant criticism, which, however, was far from affecting her spirits to the ext ent alleged.
In the summer of 1889 she published a pretty, and for once cheerful story, Miss Meredith , but within a week after correcting her latest volume of poems for the press, she died by her own hand in her parents' house, 7 Endsleigh Gardens, London, 10 Sept. 1889. No cause can or need be assigned for this lamentable event except constitutional melancholy, intensified by painful losses in her own family, increasing deafness, and probably the apprehension of insanity, combined with a total inability to derive pleasure or consolation from the extraneous circumstances which would have brightened the lives of most others. She was indeed frequently gay and animated, but her cheerfulness was but a passing mood that merely gilded her habitual melancholy, without diminishing it by a particle, while sadness grew upon her steadily, in spite of flattering success and the sympathy of affection ate friends.
Her writings offer few traces of the usual immaturity of precocious talent; they are carefully constructed and highly finished, and the sudden advance made in Reuben Sachs indicates a great reserve of undeveloped power. She was the anonymous translator of Pérés's clever brochure, Comme quoi Napoléon n'a ja mais existé .
A Bio graphy from Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-190 0, Volume 33


THE ROMANCE OF A SHOP
CHAPTER I
IN THE BEGINNING
Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel and lower the proud;
Turn thy wild wheel through sunshine, storm, and cloud;
Thy wheel and thee we neither love nor hate.
— Tennyson
There stood on Campden Hill a large, dun-coloured house, enclosed by a walled-in garden of several acres in extent. It belonged to no particular order of architecture, and was more suggestive of comfort than of splendour, with its great windows, and rambling, nondescript proportions. On one side, built out from the house itself, was a big glass structure, originally designed for a conservatory. On the April morning of which I write, the whole place wore a dejected and dismantled appearance; while in the windows and on the outer wall of the garden were fixed black and white posters, announcing a sale of effects to take place on th at day week.
The air of desolation which hung about the house had communicated itself in some vague manner to the garden, where the trees were bright with blossom, or misty with the tender green of the young leaves. Perhaps the effect of sadness was produced, or at least heightened, by the pathetic figure that paced slowly up and down the gravel path immediately before the house; the figure of a young woman, slight, not tall, bare-headed, and clothed in de ep mourning.
She paused at last in her walk, and stood a moment in a listening attitude, her face uplifted to the sky.
Gertrude Lorimer was not a beautiful woman, and such good looks as she possessed varied from day to day, almost from hour to hour; but a certain air of character and distinction clung to her through all her varying moods, and redeemed her from a possible charge o f plainness.
She had an arching, unfashionable forehead, like those of Lionardo da Vinci's women, short-sighted eyes, and an expressive month and chin. As she stood in the full light of the spring sunshine, her face pale and worn with recent sorrow, she looked, perhaps, older than her twenty- three years.
Pushing back from her forehead the hair, which, though not cut into a "fringe," had a tendency to stray about her face, and passing her hand across her eyes, with a movement expressive of mingled anxiety and resolve, she walked quickly to the door of the conservatory, opened it, and went inside.
The interior of the great glass structure would have presented a surprise to the stranger expectant of palms and orchids. It was fitted up as a photograph er's studio.
Several cameras, each of a different size, stood about the room. In one corner was a great screen of white-painted canvas; there were blinds to the roof adapted for admitting or excluding the light; and paste-pots, bottles, printing-frames, photographs in various stages of finish—a nondescript heap of professional litter—were scattered about the place from end to end.
Standing among these properties was a young girl of about twenty years of age; fair, slight, upright as a dart, with a glance at once alert and serene.
The two young creatures in their black dresses advanced to each other, then stood a moment, clinging to one another in silence.
It was the first time that either had been in the studio since the day when their unforeseen calamity had overtaken them; a calamity which seemed to them so mysterious, so unnatural, so past all belief, and yet which was common-place enough—a sudden loss of fortune, immediately followed by the sudden death of the father, crushed by the cruel blow which had fa llen on him.
"Lucy," said the elder girl at last, "is it only a for tnight ago?"
"I don't know," answered Lucy, looking round the room, whose familiar details stared at her with a hideous unfamiliarity; "I don't know if it is a hundred years or yesterday since I put that portrait of Phyllis in the printing-frame! Have you to ld Phyllis?"
"No, but I wish to do so at once; and Fanny. But here they come."
Two other black-gowned figures entered by the door which led from the house, and helped to form a sad little group in the middle of the room.
Frances Lorimer, the eldest of them all, and half-sister to the other three, was a stout, fair woman of thirty, presenting somewhat the appearance of a large and superannuated baby. She had a big face, with small, meaningless features, and faint, surprised-looking eyebrows. Her complexion had once been charmingly pink and white, but the tints had hardened, and a coarse red co